A case study on journalistic courage Larry Kramer and “1,112 and Counting”: The letter that helped start an activist movement By Leigh Beeson McGill Fellow, 2016 Larry Kramer journalism case study 1 Introduction Depending on whom you ask, Larry Kramer may or may not qualify as a journalist. The New York Times frequently featured Kramer’s op-eds during the HIV/AIDS crisis, but he is just as likely to be the subject of an interview or story as he is to be the person reporting it.i He’s a writer, a gay rights activist, and a playwright known for the Oscar-nominated film Women in Love, award-winning play-turned-HBO-movie The Normal Heart, and the controversial novel Faggots that details a gay man’s struggle to find love in 1970s New York City.ii His novel’s detailed account of the gay sex scene made him into “something of a persona non grata,” in part because Kramer appeared to rain on the parade that was the gay community’s sexual liberation.iii Although panned at the time by some in the gay community, the novel ultimately became a best seller that darkly foretold the impending mass causalities wrought by HIV/AIDS when the lead character warns his lover to change his ways “before you fuck yourself to death.”iv Perhaps most importantly, though, Kramer is a revolutionary, one of the loudest voices calling the government and public to account for its inaction when a mysterious bundle of illnesses started appearing first in the gay community, then in hemophiliacs and people given blood transfusions during surgery, and finally the straight general population. He helped found two groups, Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), that were instrumental in helping those afflicted by HIV/AIDS during the onset of the epidemic and in “bringing drugs to market that now make it possible for millions of HIV- positive people to live reasonably normal lives.”v Kramer was a “biblical figure, the Jeremiah if not the Moses of the AIDS struggle,”vi but his condemnation of the promiscuity of other gay men at a time when many homosexuals placed great value on sexual expression and freedom put him at odds with the prevailing culture.vii Larry Kramer journalism case study 2 After learning of the new mysterious virus that was rapidly killing off the community surrounding him, Kramer became one of the first people to publicly and loudly ask why no one was doing anything to help those afflicted by the disease. In what is now known as a defining moment in the rise of HIV/AIDS awareness and activism, Kramer’s letter “1,112 and Counting,” published in March 1983 in the New York Native, arguably the most notable gay newspaper at the time, thrust the disease into the spotlight, warning readers that “our continued existence as gay men upon the face of this earth is at stake. Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die.”viii It wasn’t Kramer’s first time writing an op-ed for a newspaper, but “1,112 and Counting” was possibly his most influential, the equivalent of throwing a “hand grenade into the foxhole of denial where most gay men in the United States had been sitting out the epidemic,” according to journalist Randy Shilts.ix In his best-selling history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic And the Band Played On, Shilts further describes Kramer’s piece as “inarguably one of the most influential works of advocacy journalism of the decade.”x Media coverage, or lack thereof, in the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic It's hard to imagine that the national response to the emergence of AIDS ranged from indifference to hostility. But that's exactly what happened when gay men in 1981 began dying of a strange array of opportunistic infections. — David J. Jefferson, Newsweek May 14, 2006xi When the virus now known as HIV first started making people sick and AIDS started killing them, no one—including the gay community that was beginning to be ravaged by the disease—seemed to care.xii The Centers for Disease Control published its first report in June 1981, documenting cases of a rare form of pneumonia previously unheard of in otherwise healthy populations that had started killing gay men.xiii So as to not offend anyone’s moral Larry Kramer journalism case study 3 sensibilities, the headline of the report, published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, didn’t reference homosexuality and the report itself was buried inside the issue rather than on the front page.xiv The following month, the CDC reported cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer that causes red-purplish patches to grow on the skin and that was most commonly seen in older men of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean descent,xv in addition to more cases of the surprisingly deadly pneumonia in gay men “in the driest possible prose.”xvi The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle all ran stories,xvii but the articles were exceedingly cautious, with The New York Times reporting that people outside the homosexual population weren’t at risk and that there was likely an environmental factor at play and there was reason to believe it was not a contagious illness.xviii “This day in the limelight, however, was the most attention the new epidemic would receive for the next year…the outbreak faded from newsprint and became an item of interest largely to gay men.”xix Media lost interest in the story despite the fact that by the end of the year, 270 gay men were officially reported as being immunodeficient and 121 of them were dead.xx Even in the early days of the epidemic, there were researchers who believed that maybe the group of illnesses were caused by an infectious agent and that maybe that infectious agent was a contagious virus, but for the most part, the federal government and the media played it safe, preferring to keep the public calm as it painfully slowly sorted things out.xxi At best, the media were neglectful in their approach, with The New York Times featuring under a dozen stories in 1981 and 1982 on what people were calling “gay cancer” and the Wall Street Journal only deigning to cover the exponentially increasing threat to public health after straight victims were discovered.xxii As Shilts phrased it, “the gay plague got covered only because it finally had struck people who counted, people who were not homosexuals.”xxiii At Larry Kramer journalism case study 4 worst, they were a key part of the problem, being at least partly to blame for the slow response time both within the communities being decimated by the mysterious illness and in the communities that had the political clout to actually do something about it. The New York Native, for instance, beat the June 5, 1981, MMWR report on the new gay cancer with a piece published in mid-May that the public health department said the claims of a dangerous new killer disease among gays were “unfounded.”xxiv Larry Kramer, however, was immediately alarmed and quickly got a group of supporters together, laying the foundation for GMHC, officially founded in 1982.xxv The group created a hotline—the first of its kind—to help people facing the newly CDC-declared epidemic, distributed informative pamphlets, and created a program that paired sick men with people who could help them in their day-to-day lives.xxvi But that wasn’t enough for Kramer. He went back and forth with opponents about what the gay community needed to do in Native op-eds during the early outbreak period and he harassed The New York Times and the mayor of New York City’s office, but for the most part, no one really seemed to be listening.xxvii His militant approach may have been to blame. He “condemns what he sees as gay men’s irresponsible promiscuity, but in so doing he provokes and offends the constituency—other gay men—whose support he is supposedly soliciting.”xxviii Kramer himself characterizes the angry response to his letters to the editor as backlash to his views on gay promiscuity.xxix “It was very obvious what was causing it, and I said that if you had a brain, you should start cooling it. And that made a lot of enemies,” Kramer said in the 30th anniversary issue of New York Magazine.xxx With those first few letters, though, Kramer was just getting started. “1,112 and Counting” and the choices Larry Kramer made in publishing it Larry Kramer journalism case study 5 If this article doesn't scare the shit out of you, we're in real trouble. If this article doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get. — Larry Kramer, New York Native Issue 59, March 14-27, 1983xxxi Tired of waiting on the government and media to act, Kramer submitted “1,112 and Counting” to the New York Native. Making it clear that his writing was personal and not on behalf of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis group, Kramer warned readers of the more than 1,000 cases (and growing) of AIDS; that health care workers were baffled and didn’t know how to treat the patients coming down with the illness, let alone save them from a terrifyingly gruesome death in most cases; and that unless they made radical changes to their lifestyles, the entire gay community might go up in flames.xxxii He attacked the government, specifically New York City’s mayor, for its inaction, saying that no other community would’ve been forced to suffer for two years, to wait and watch as more and more of its members became ill and died.